The Bump Stops Here

"I bear responsibility for everything--to some degree."

Republicans have been sharply critical of President Obama for this exchange in an interview with Steve Kroft of CBS's "60 Minutes":

Kroft: Have the events that took place in the Middle East, the recent events in the Middle East given you any pause about your support for the governments that have come to power following the Arab Spring?

Obama: Well, I'd said even at the time that this is going to be a rocky path. The question presumes that somehow we could have stopped this wave of change. I think it was absolutely the right thing for us to do to align ourselves with democracy, universal rights, a notion that people have to be able to participate in their own governance. But I was pretty certain and continue to be pretty certain that there are going to be bumps in the road because, you know, in a lot of these places, the one organizing principle has been Islam. The one part of society that hasn't been controlled completely by the government.

There are strains of extremism, and anti-Americanism, and anti-Western sentiment. And, you know, can be tapped into by demagogues. There will probably be some times where we bump up against some of these countries and have strong disagreements, but I do think that over the long term we are more likely to get a Middle East and North Africa that is more peaceful, more prosperous and more aligned with our interests.

The GOP criticism is that "bumps in the road" is an awfully mild way of referring to the murder of a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans. The Democratic defense, as ABC's Jake Tapper reports, is that that's a tendentious construction of Obama's words. An unnamed "senior administration official" emails Tapper: "It's just not true that he was characterizing the attack in Benghazi--the question doesn't even make mention of it. He's speaking about broad trends."

ENLARGE

Obama on "60 Minutes."
CBS/YouTube

Each side has a bit of a point here. The question didn't specifically mention the attack in Benghazi, but surely it would top anybody's list of "the recent events in the Middle East." What troubles this column more is the odd combination of stubbornness and passivity that characterizes Obama's response--indeed, that is central to his style of what passes for leadership.

In answer to a question about domestic politics, CNSNews.com notes, Obama said this: "Oh I think that, you know, as president I bear responsibility for everything--to some degree." The bump stops here!

BuzzFeed.com reports on the latest effort at bump-passing. The State Department has "slammed CNN for its 'disgusting' handling of Ambassador Christopher Stevens' diary," which CNN says it "found on the floor of the largely unsecured consulate compound." BuzzFeed sums up: "The diary helped confirm, as the network reported, that Stevens had been worried about the threat of an Al Qaeda attack, and even feared his own name was included on a hit list."

That contradicted "the line the State Department and the administration had been pushing," namely "that there was no intelligence of a coming attack" and "that the attack could be blamed solely on an anti-Islamic video." BuzzFeed argues that the blame rests mostly with Foggy Bottom and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton:

The election-year focus on President Barack Obama meant that the White House had at first been catching most of the heat for the tragedy in Benghazi. . . . But in reality, the fiasco appears to be largely--if not entirely--a State Department botch. It was the State Department that failed to provide its ambassador adequate security; it was the State Department that fled Benghazi in the aftermath of the attack, apparently failing to clear or secure the scene, leaving Stevens' diary behind; and it was State that had taken the lead on the ground after the Libya intervention.

Well, no one can dispute that the State Department fouled up. It may be that the old Obama-Clinton rivalry is coming to the fore. (On that note, see this headline over an Associated Press story from yesterday: "Poor Economy Could Cost Obama Youth Vote, [Bill] Clinton Says.")

But blaming Mrs. Clinton hardly gets Obama off the hook. She serves at his pleasure, after all, and if the State Department is leading him astray, he isn't leading.

Obama's lack of leadership is also on display in Egypt, strategically a far more important country than Libya. A week and a half ago, as we noted, the New York Times published a piece designed to depict Obama as a tough guy. Our president had placed a "blunt phone call" to his Cairo counterpart, Mohamed Morsi, and Morsi hastened to yield:

Egyptian leaders scrambled Thursday to try to repair the country's alliance with Washington, tacitly acknowledging that they erred in their response to the attack on the United States Embassy by seeking to first appease anti-American domestic opinion without offering a robust condemnation of the violence.

But Morsi's own account of the phone call was quite different, as Reuters reported:

On Thursday, [Morsi] said he asked U.S. President Barack Obama to act against those seeking to harm relations. His cabinet said Washington was not to blame for the film but urged the United States to take legal action against those insulting religion.

Which of the two men actually dominated the conversation? Perhaps tellingly, there was no indication even in the Times report that Obama made clear to Morsi that there would be no "legal action against those insulting religion" because any such action would violate the American Constitution. A clear defense of constitutional principles has been absent from the administration's public statements as well.

Compare Obama's passivity in the "60 Minutes" interview with Morsi's confidence, even cockiness, in an interview to the Times published yesterday:

On the eve of his first trip to the United States as Egypt's new Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi said the United States needed to fundamentally change its approach to the Arab world, showing greater respect for its values and helping build a Palestinian state, if it hoped to overcome decades of pent-up anger. . . .

If Washington is asking Egypt to honor its treaty with Israel, he said, Washington should also live up to its own Camp David commitment to Palestinian self-rule. He said the United States must respect the Arab world's history and culture, even when that conflicts with Western values.

And he dismissed criticism from the White House that he did not move fast enough to condemn protesters who recently climbed over the United States Embassy wall and burned the American flag in anger over a video that mocked the Prophet Muhammad.

He suggested that Egypt would not be hostile to the West, but would not be as compliant as [Hosni] Mubarak either.

"Successive American administrations essentially purchased with American taxpayer money the dislike, if not the hatred, of the peoples of the region," he said, by backing dictatorial governments over popular opposition and supporting Israel over the Palestinians.

Morsi is living up to Obama's characterization in another recent interview: "You know, I don't think that we would consider them [the Egyptians] an ally but we don't consider them an enemy." Actually, Egypt is formally designated a "major non-NATO ally." Will Obama's passivity permit Morsi to redefine the terms of that alliance in a way that is inimical to American interests?

Any Excuse Will Do The other day CNN published an astonishing essay by Brian McLaren, a leftist pastor and author of "Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road? Christian Identity in a Multi-Faith World." Here's how it begins:

I was raised as an evangelical Christian in America, and any discussion of Christian-Jewish-Muslim relations around the world must include the phenomenon of American Islamophobia, for which large sectors of evangelical Christianity in America serve as a greenhouse.

At a time when U.S. embassies are being attacked and when people are getting killed over an offensive, adolescent and puerile film targeting Islam--beyond pathetic in its tawdriness--we must begin to own up to the reality of evangelical Islamaphobia [sic].

That latter paragraph is a stunning inversion. The thugs who are attacking U.S. embassies are not suffering from "Islamophobia." Quite the contrary, they are acting in the name of Islam. And while it is true enough that theirs is not the only interpretation of Islam, their actions are evidence not that "Islamophobia" is a menace but that fear of Islam is not entirely irrational.

Equally jaw-dropping is this letter to the editor of the Washington Post, from Steve York of Takoma Park, Md.:

This piece reported, as did many published accounts of recent protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, that a U.S. flag was torn down and replaced by a black flag bearing the words "There is no god but Allah." This translation from Arabic is incorrect, unfortunate and harmful. It should have been quoted as "There is no god but God."

By leaving only the second instance of the word in Arabic, the "translated" text implies that Allah is a Muslim God, which is incorrect. Allah is simply the Arabic word for God. As adherents of the Abrahamic tradition, Muslims revere the same God as Christians and Jews. Whether inadvertent or not, this incorrect rendering suggests that Muslims denigrate or deny the existence of all gods but their own, which is absolutely untrue.

Unfortunately, such reporting and editing needlessly reinforces antagonism and division among adherents of different religious [sic], just at a time when greater understanding is needed. The phrase "There is no god but God" is a straightforward declaration of monotheistic belief, and nothing else. It is the Islamic equivalent of "Thou shalt have no other gods before me," the first of the Ten Commandments.

York scores a small pedantic point: Allah is indeed the Arabic word for God, used by Arabic-speaking Christians and Jews as well as Muslims. Taken entirely on its own, the statement "There is no God but God" is, as York asserts, merely "a straightforward declaration of monotheistic belief." He loses that point, however, for failing to recognize that those who make such statements do thereby "denigrate or deny the existence of all gods but their own."

But all this is beside the point. Context can give evil meanings to inoffensive words. The black flag that displayed the monotheistic truism is said to be the flag of al Qaeda. We don't normally resort to the argumentum ad Hitlerum, but York's argument is rather like excusing the Nazis on the ground that work really is liberating.

OK, one more, this time from NPR, which notes that American Muslims haven't been rioting or even protesting over the silly YouTube trailer:

Why the subdued response in the U.S.?

Jonathan Brown, an assistant professor of Islamic studies at Georgetown University, offers one theory. He thinks some American Muslims are too scared to protest.

"In a post 9/11 world, they're absolutely frightened to stick their heads out in any way, shape or form," he says. "They are still apologizing for attacks they didn't do."

Even Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations scoffs, saying, in NPR's paraphrase, that "Muslims in America . . . pick which battles they think are worth fighting--and the film . . . simply did not make the cut."

What explains these absurd statements from McLaren, York and Brown is oikophobia. They have an antipathy for people like themselves--Americans, Christians. Their seeming sympathy for Islam (perhaps genuine in Brown's case, since he is a scholar of the subject) is really just a reflex to side with the "other" because it makes them feel superior to those in their own in-group.

Quotation Innovation In a post on the New York Times website, former Enron adviser Paul Krugman quotes Mitt Romney, then sums it up as follows:

In effect, Romney was saying, "I am the confidence fairy!"

"Confidence fairy" is a Krugman coinage, the sort of cutesy turn of phrase that one expects from a popular but mediocre writer. But blogress Ann Althouse notes that the headline of Krugman's post omits the qualifier "in effect" and reads simply: "Mitt Romney Says, 'I Am the Confidence Fairy!' " (Krugman's headline actually uses double quotes).

Is it really acceptable at the Times now to put quote marks around something the source didn't actually say?

Althouse also suggests that "fairy" is a homophobic dog whistle, but we wouldn't know about that.

Other Than That, the Story Was Accurate "The Ratings table with August's 'How Safe Is your Hospital' showed an incorrect infections Rating for certain hospitals, though the error does not affect any of the hospitals' Safety scores nor their overall ranking. Specifically, 128 of the 1,159 hospitals were shown as having a better infections Rating than they actually had; five others were listed as having a worse Rating than they had. (Your copy of the magazine carried fewer than the 1,159 total because the table was split into four regional editions.) All changes were limited to one-step moves in our five-point scale. We do not believe the changes should affect your choice of hospital since, as the article said, you should pay attention to differences in Safety score, and those were all calculated correctly. Below is a complete list of hospitals affected and their original and corrected infections Ratings and unchanged Safety scores. The table is listed in alphabetical order by state. For those who downloaded the issue on an iPad, the file has been updated and may be downloaded through the iTunes App Store."--Consumer Reports website, no date shown

Out on a Limb "Analysis: Release of 2011 Taxes Unlikely to Mollify Romney Critics"--headline, Los Angeles Times website, Sept. 21

'If I Had a Hammer . . . I'd Hammer Out Love' "April Dawn Peters, 31, of 2194 Grandview Way, in Cosby, [was] arrested Sept. 19, at 10:30 p.m., and charged with aggravated assault after she allegedly hit a man on his head at least five times with a hammer that she was having sex with."--Newport (Tenn.) Plain Talk, Sept. 22

A posting on August 20, "Dating Tales of a Church Girl: My Epic Christian Online Dating Fail," in which the author described her experiences as a member of a dating website, has been removed because it contained numerous factual inaccuracies, including her purchase of a one-year membership at the site, the cost of that one-year membership, her description of her experience on the site, and the substance of emails and photos she received from other members.

This correction ran on Aug. 27, so it would normally be too dated to include in the column. But it really is the Platonic ideal of "Other Than That, the Story Was Accurate," isn't it?

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